The Indian Runner

This extraordinary film, a stiletto-edged domestic melodrama that, at different times, evokes the work of Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the other, unrelated Penn (Arthur, director of Bonnie and Clyde), is harrowingly honest in content yet lyrically elegiac in style. [21 Sep 1991]

Some of the Indian imagery in the film is arch, but the story, the acting and the tension level are of the highest order. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

It's impressive, how thoughtfully Penn handles this material. Read full review

Indian Runner, for all its faults, is only half-bad. For an hour or so, the movie may get to you on a scene-by-scene basis. [06 Dec 1991, p.24]

Loose, rambling and sometimes rudderless as it is, The Indian Runner has a fundamental honesty that gives it real substance. Read full review

What actually happens is generally predictable, degenerating into violence as the brothers test each other to the full. But the way the story is expressed is more original, since Penn lingers long enough on his scenes of rural heartland life to get more out of them than would be vouchsafed by your average American family saga. [28 Nov 1991]

It has weak spots, including bits of mystical mumbo jumbo about a legendary "Indian runner" with a ghostly message. But most of the film is articulate and absorbing. Read full review

Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step. Read full review

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

A tortured examination of the disintegration of a Mid-western family, The Indian Runner is very much actors' cinema. Rambling, indulgent and joltingly raw at times, Sean Penn's first outing as a director takes a fair amount of patience to get through but has an integrity that intermittently serves it well. Read full review

The only factor that keeps the outcome from being a grand success is the film's script. It's hampered by its focus on a pivotal character with so few redeeming graces that the movie never grabs interest, or emotions, as effectively as it should. [20 Sep 1991]

Although overly self-involved, Penn is surprisingly focused as a director. Read full review

In the character of Joe, David Morse and Penn have created an authentic hero of everyday life, and in a generally well acted picture, Charles Bronson as the boys' father reveals for the first time in some years his more vulnerable side and demonstrates what a fine actor he is. [01 Dec 1991, p.60]

In his debut as a writer-director, Sean Penn shows a sure hand with actors and a knack for setting up a scene visually and dramatically. But he’s a bust at following through. Read full review

It's an interesting film, with fine acting performances. Penn acquits himself in this project, his first as a behind-the-camera talent, though The Indian Runner never quite establishes an assured rhythm or fluidity. Read full review

Stranded somewhere between exuberantly bad and merely boring, THE INDIAN RUNNER is a bloated resume film hobbled by a script as slight as the Bruce Springsteen song upon which it's based. Read full review

After its compelling first hour, The Indian Runner gets self-indulgent and repetitive. But Penn has the gifts of a real filmmaker -- an eye, an ear and a heart. [23 Sep 1991, p.57B]

The Penn-manship here is far from unimpressive. But if Sean gets a second chance, he should make his audience care as much as he does. [23 Sep 1991, p.4D]

Unrelentingly bleak, somewhat pretentious and rather too long, Sean Penn's feature debut as writer-director nevertheless shows some promise. [04 Oct 1991, p.28]

Potentially potent and not without naive charm, but ultimately a masturbatory ejaculation of all too personal juices. Read full review

While [Penn] has all the heavyweight America-gone-sour themes and confused characters found in roadside movies like Five Easy Pieces, Electra Glide In Blue or Thieves Like Us, he misses the eccentric and exciting spikiness that made them more than just gloomfests. Read full review

Not only is [Penn's] film overlong and overwrought, it suffers from a pacing that is so deliberate it is positively sluggish. [04 Oct 1991, p.K]

Penn has overwritten the dialogue and, though the filmed-in-Nebraska movie has a certain gritty authenticity, it rings vaguely false. You sense he has no knowledge of the '60s, Midwestern angst or smalltown life. [04 Oct 1991]

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity. Read full review